Bel Canto(67)

“Gen!” Victor Fyodorov said just as he was approaching the bathroom door. “How can you be so difficult to find when there is no place for you to go?”

“I didn’t realize—”

“Her voice this morning, didn’t you think? Perfection!”

Gen agreed.

“So, this is the time to talk to her.”

“Now?”

“Now I know is the perfect time.”

“I’ve asked you every day this week.”

“And I have not been completely prepared, that is true, but this morning when she went over and over again on the Rossini, I knew that she would understand my inadequacies. She is a compassionate woman. Today I was assured of that.” Fyodorov was twisting his big hands one around the other as if he were washing them beneath some unseen stream of water. Though his voice was calm, there was a distinct look of panic in his eyes, the sharp smell of panic on his skin.

“The time for me is not exactly—”

“The time for me,” Fyodorov said. Then he added in a low voice, “I will lose my nerve to speak.” Fyodorov had shaved off his heavy growth of beard, a process that had been both painful and time-consuming, given the poor quality of the razor blades, and left behind a vast expanse of his own raw, pink face. He had had the Vice President wash and iron his clothes while he stood beside the washing machine, shivering with a towel around his waist. He had bathed and trimmed the hairs from his nose and ears with a pair of cuticle scissors that he had bribed off of Gilbert with a pack of cigarettes. While he had the chance, he cut his nails and tried to do something about his hair, but that proved to be too great a task for cuticle scissors. He had made every effort he knew to make. This was most certainly the day.

Gen nodded towards the bathroom door. “I was on my way.”

Fyodorov looked over his shoulder and then held out his hand as if to lead Gen in. “Of course. Of course that is nothing. That long I can wait. However long. You take your time. I will be outside the door. I will make sure that I am first in line for our translator when he is finished.” Sweat was creeping down the sides of Fyodorov’s shirt, leaving a new dark stain inside a history of much paler stains. Gen wondered if that was what he meant by being unable to wait much longer.

“One minute,” he said quietly, and then let himself inside without knocking.

“I wish I knew what you were saying.” Carmen laughed. She tried to mimic the words, spoke a Russian nonsense which sounded something close to, “I never cracker table.”

Gen put a finger to his lips. The room was small and very dark, black marble walls, black marble floors. One of the lights had burned out next to the mirror. Gen would have to remember to ask Ruben about a new bulb.

She sat up on the sink. “It sounded very important. It was Ledbed, the Russian?” She was whispering.

Gen told her it was Fyodorov.

“Oh, the big one. How do you know Russian, too? How do you know so many languages?”

“It’s my job.”

“No, no. It’s because you understand something and I want to know it, too.”

“I only have a minute,” he whispered. He was so close to her hair, which was darker, deeper even than the marble. “I have to translate for him. He’s waiting right outside the door.”

“We can talk tonight.”

Gen shook his head. “I want to talk about what you said. What do you mean, this is where we live now?”

Carmen sighed. “You know I can’t say. But ask yourself, would it be so awful if we all stayed here in this beautiful house?” This room was a third of the size of the china closet. Her knees touched his legs. If he took even a half step back he would be on the commode. She wished she could take his hand. Why would he want to leave her, leave this place?

“This has to end sooner or later,” he said. “These sorts of things never just go on indefinitely, somebody stops them.”

“Only if people do terrible things. We haven’t hurt anyone. No one is unhappy here.”

“Everyone is unhappy here.” But even as he was saying it Gen was not entirely sure it was true. Carmen’s face turned down and she studied her hands in her lap.

“Go on and translate,” she said.

“If there’s something you should tell me.”

Carmen’s eyes were watery and she blinked them hard. How ridiculous it would be for her to cry. Would it be such a terrible thing to stay? Be together long enough to speak perfect Spanish, to read it and write, to learn English and then maybe some Japanese? But that was her own selfishness. She knew that. Gen was right to want to get away from her. She offered nothing. She only took his time. “I don’t know a thing.”

Fyodorov knocked on the door. His mounting nervousness would not allow him to do otherwise. “Trans-laaa-tor?” He sang the word.

“A minute,” Gen called through the door.

Time was up and now Carmen had lost a couple of tears. There needed to be whole days together. There needed to be weeks and months of uninterrupted time to say all the things that needed to be said. “Maybe you’re right,” he told her finally. The way she was sitting on the black marble sink in front of the mirror, he could see both her face and her narrow back at the same time. He could see in the large oval mirror with the frame of gilded gold leaves, his own face over her shoulder, looking at her. He could see in his face a love that was so obviously displayed that she must already know everything there was to know about it. He was so close to her then that they owned every molecule of air in the tiny room and the air grew heavy with their desire and worked to move them together. It was with the smallest step forward that his face was in her hair and then her arms were around his back and they were holding each other. It seemed so simple to get to this place, such a magnificent relief, that he couldn’t imagine why he had not been holding her every minute since they first met.